Monday, August 04, 2008

A Direct Connection

The percentage of young people who use a gun to kill themselves is higher in Switzerland than any other European country, according to an international survey.

This is directly connected to liberal Swiss gun laws and the easy availability of weapons, said researchers from the European Alliance Against Depression, whose study is published in the current edition of the Journal of Affective Disorders.
Well yeah...haven't we established that guns cause suicide...? Oh, wait...

I love the way assumptions are selectively engineered to highlight the intended outcome and omit everything else. That's not the way science works, but it is a common tactic used by scam artists. I'll be curious to see what someone like John Lott can tell us about the methodologies and conclusions. But in the mean time, the sound bite has been created to send the hysterics off and running.

Globalist headshrinkers. Is there anything they don't know?

7 comments:

  1. If guns are readily available then they'll be used favored in suicides. The availability of guns has nothing to do with the rate of murder or suicide in general, only the method. That point is conveniently skipped by all anti's.

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  2. The new storms that are hitting the gulf coast are because of the guns that haven't been returned in New Orleans as order by a court. As long as New Orleans refuses to allow the rightful owner to have their firearms back the storms are going to keep hitting the gulf coast.

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  3. Well in all fairness it might contribute to the success rate of said suicides.

    The availability of a highly lethal means with which one may kill oneself is reason to see the relationship. the problem is that the causation goes the other way. I imagine that guns vs. no guns would have very little effect on the number of suicides attempted net. However I would expect it to have an effect on the number of successes.

    Not that this is any reason for regulation, But a blind person could see a correlation between suicide fatalities and liberal gun laws. If you REALLY wanna kill yourself, you're not going to fuck around.

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  4. Plus they always gloss over the fact that those liberal laws (oxymoron?) changed almost a decade ago; brought to our attention, interestingly enough, by John Lott. If I click on the title link, will I be provided with a study that compares the current rate with the one before the new restrictions were put in place?

    Probably not. I believe this is the third time I'm posted to the link to John Lott's article. Do the disarmers have a calendar, with dates to rerun the same stories?

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  5. "This is directly connected to liberal Swiss gun laws"

    this is outright misrepresentation; no statistical analysis ever gives you causation. it only yields correlation.

    as for science, it can suggest causation but for the lack of a better explanation -- there is still no truth in science (and, yes, i am a scientist).

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  6. I'd accept Switzerland's suicide rate in order to prevent Germany's genocide rate. Just over the border, an Alp away, there are cities that had Jews from medieval times until 1940, but none since. Some people alive today remember when they suddenly weren't there anymore. Has human nature changed that much in 70 years?

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  7. doing a little research here, there are some years where the total number of murders by gun is LESS than the murders by other methods in Switzerland!

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